It’s been five years since the rock world mourned the loss of Motörhead icon Lemmy Kilmister and now Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian has reflected on the first time the two powerhouses crossed paths.
Ian recently appeared on The Fred Minnick Show for an interview that saw him reflect on Lemmy Kilmister’s inimitable legacy, and weigh in on the state of new music.
During the appearance, Scott Ian recalled a particularly heartwarming, and painfully Lemmy story that took place in London.
“Well, the first whiskey I ever had was a Jack & Coke with Lemmy in 1985 at a bar in London where I bumped into him. He’s my hero, and I bumped into him in a bar – and I didn’t even drink at the time,” shared Ian.
“I was 21, I didn’t drink. And I saw Lemmy and I offered to buy him a drink. And he said, ‘You’re in my town, I’ll buy you a drink. What are you having?’ And I didn’t even know how to answer that question, so I just said, ‘I’ll have whatever you’re having.’
“And he was drinking Jack & Coke, so all of a sudden I’ve got a whiskey in front of me and I’m worried that I’m gonna throw up on his white boots and get fired from heavy metal.”
Ian went on to detail that he ran into Lemmy six months later during Anthrax’s debut headlining gig in London.
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Unfortunately for Ian, his inability to hold his liquor was ingrained in the Motörhead legend’s memory.
“He was there backstage. And he’s saying hi to everybody, and he looks at me and he’s like, ‘How are you feeling?’ And I said, ‘You remember me?’,” he recalled. “And he said, ‘Yeah, I met you at St. Ritz, we were drinking and at some point, you stopped speaking English.’ And I said, ‘I hope I didn’t do anything to offend you…'”
“He said, ‘No, I just couldn’t understand what you were saying to me. And then you ran out of the bar. I figured you weren’t feeling so good.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I wasn’t that much of a drinker.’ He was like, ‘Yeah, I could tell.'”
Elsewhere in the interview, Scott Ian was asked whether there are any new bands that have caught his attention of late and he gave kudos to the reigning hardcore titans, Pennsylvania’s Code Orange.
“Yeah, we had this band on tour with us just a couple of years ago, they were called Code Orange and they were opening the tour. I hadn’t heard of them before the tour, and I went out and watched them the first night, and I was completely blown away by their energy!,” he recalled.
“I had never seen anything as energetic and the aggression, and the passion that this band was giving to the audience. And in front of an audience that, I would say, at the time, 90% of the crowd didn’t know who the hell they were,” He continued.
“But they were hitting it so hard on that stage, they refused to be denied the audience, and they crushed, and they won the audience over. They’ve since kind of blown up since that tour and they’re doing really.
“I think they’re a band that could go on because they’re really pushing the boundaries musically too. They’re not just a hardcore band, they’re not just a metal band, they have so many other elements in their sound.”
If you haven’t watched Code Orange’s blistering Livestream special ‘Last Ones Left: In Fear of the End’, we urge you to check it out below.
Check out Code Orange perform ‘Last Ones Left: In Fear of the End’:
